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Announcements

So this last semester was hectic! Trying to graduate, you know? Well it looks like I succeeded!

Redacted the mailing address and some info you don't need. :P

This means that I’ll be moving out to San Francisco, California at the end of June and starting work as a Software Engineer at Zynga at the start of July! In the meantime I am going to try to work through my backlog of projects, so you should be seeing more in this space soon.

For now I’ll share a quick video of an AI project I worked on this past semester:

It was definitely a fun little challenge to make an AI that can play Mario! Hopefully I can find some to tinker with this sort of thing some more.

Now that school is out, it is GO TIME! Time to hit the gas hard and build a game engine for my next big project. I’ve finished a pretty decent prototype of the basics of the game (movement, procedural character animation, and platforms). Take a look at the following video to see it in action.

The idea is that the player controls a piece of gum that sticks to [nearly] any surface. Being a piece of gum, you can’t jump but you can detach from surfaces, putting a new spin on the platformer. A few more gameplay elements are in the works, but I don’t want to give too much away right now. I’m currently working on some of the more traditional components, such as parallaxing backgrounds. Look for another update in the next few weeks.

It’s the end of 200X. Now, we begin a new decade. I hope, as you too probably hope, that it goes smoothly… or at least than the last. While we aren’t where we thought we’d be, individually, as a country, or as a world, we have still moved forward more than back.

Here’s to the New Year! To the New Decade! May 2010 be everything you hope and more!

I just wanted to appologize for the complete lack of updates lately. I am still adjusting to the schedule my new job imposes on me, but once I can get a handle on things, there is a lot I want to post. Further, my productivity has been rather low because my laptop is finally getting fixed (the screen has more or less been detached from it for two months). I have a netbook on loan, but as neat as it is, it is a pain to do any major dev work or writing on.

Yeah, that’s all I have except to gush about my new job.

Ok, since you are still reaaing I’ll take it that you want to know. Small software companies, especially video game companies are just wonderful to work for. HiRez Studios is no exception. If the work isn’t fun, it is at least interesting, the people are just great, and lunch is provided 3 days a week (who doesn’t love free food). So even though it is a 45 minute drive from my house and really cuts into my “being a lazy slob”, I am glad I got an internship there.

You may or may not have noticed the comic link up at the top of the page. I started an online comic based on a game I am working on a couple weeks ago. So far I only have 2 pages up, but I should have the third up on Monday. It is a little unusual; it has no words in it at all. No dialog. No sound effects. No text. This makes it quite a challenge to write, albeit a fun one. I feel that comics are a primarily visual medium, and I want to see how much I can convey purely through images. I want the “reader” to imagine his or her own dialog and sound effects. Hopefully it goes well, right now it is too early to tell.

While I primarily want to create an entertaining, humorous comic, I have some auxiliary goals with this comic as well, including:

Ok, so I am trying to keep up the momentum and get as much stuff fixed/posted on this site before life catches up with me. I finally got the Musical Curves applet Brett Dutro and I wrote online. You can find that here. Also, I wrote a fairly lengthy tutorial post on working with sound in Flash. I tried some new and time consuming formatting with it, and for the most part I like it. I need to modify the look of the code viewer I found so it clashes with the background less, but I think it is ok for now. (If you have any suggestions for a better code viewer with automatic syntax highlighting, let me know.) You can find that page here. I am not going to post tutorials on any sort of regular basis, they will get up there as I am motivated to write them.

Oh, I saw the strangest banner ad on Facebook today for ancestry.com, so I saved a copy of it to post here. I know what they were trying to do with the banner, but it really just came off as a creepy man trying to kiss a baby.

On a more serious note, the site itself is great if you want to learn more about your genealogy, and its World Archives Project is rather ambitious, and a very good use of crowdsourcing(everyone loves buzzwords).

Crowdsourcing, if you haven’t heard of it, is the act of dividing a task that is either too large for an in-house team to complete, or too complex for a computer to churn through up and disseminating it to a large number people, usually via the Internet. It is essentially a wetware version of cloud computing. Kinda cool, right? Another interesting crowdsourcing site is Innocentive; a crowdsourced R&D company specializing in sciences and engineering. They post problems from companies, and the crowd responds with a solution. If the solution is considered appropriate, the supplier gets a fairly hefty reward.

Well that is more or less all I have for today. Before I go here are a couple interesting links. (This is going to become a regular thing I think, so even if my posts aren’t interesting you will have somewhere interesting to go.)

A quick panorama of the San Franisco skyline fron the conventon center.

Well, the 2009 Game Developer’s Conference was a blast. I learned a ton, saw some cool new techs (like OnLive), got a lot of inspiration, and did a bit of this “networking” thing. Now it is back to classes…

I think I can call this site more or less live now. A couple pages need some more content, are broken, or need to be updated, but the majority are up. I am especially happy that I finally got the photomosaic program I wrote in Flash ages ago online!

One last thing before I head off to bed. Congratulations to the WiredCats, team 2415, for winning first place at anotherFIRST regional event! Championships here we come!!